by Rob Horner
“Other than the barracks and the gym, you’ve seen everything now,” Tiffany said to me. “We’ll show you the Distilling Room once we get everyone back home, Brian. Right now, it looks like a Red Cross shelter during a hurricane.”
“I remember you saying something about me being with a large group of people,” Brian said. “Do you know how I ended up with them?”
Tiffany shook her head. “They had already started capturing people when I got here. Like you guys, I’ve only had my ability since the lights came down.”
“I’ve been in on a few missions,” Ricardo said. “It’s all happened over the past four days, though the majority were brought in during the first two, a way for Command to clean up our immediate area. It was more about protecting our location than any concerted effort to make a change. After that, we wanted to make a strike at the closest resonator.”
“The carnival,” I said, nodding. “That’s why you were there?”
“Yes,” she replied, placing a hand on my shoulder. “And even though it might seem like things didn’t go that well, remember that if we weren’t there, you might have been taken.”
“And,” Ricardo added, “if you hadn’t been there, we would have probably been overrun.”
“Sounds like you helped them as much as they helped you,” Brian said.
The words were welcome, but they brought back the guilt hanging at the fringes of my thoughts, always there, threatening to overwhelm me. Tanya was possessed, a hostage in her own body as a Dra’Gal controlled her like a puppet. Crystal too, though I’d be lying if I said freeing her was as important to me as saving Tanya.
“More,” Ricardo answered. “Before Johnny, we had no way of saving people. The best we could do was gather them and try to prevent them from…um…transforming.”
“A situation that was well on the way to being untenable,” Tiffany added. “And with Ben’s death, there’s no way Danielle could have kept them caged much longer.”
The look the brunette gave me bordered on worship and made me distinctly uncomfortable. Turning, I placed my hands on the double doors leading to the cafeteria and gave them a gentle push, forgetting for the moment that everything was opened with those strange white cards with the golden square in the center.
“It won’t open without a chip card,” Ricardo said, stretching his out on its lanyard and touching the wall to the right of the doors. “You’ll get yours when you meet with Fish in the Operations Room.”
A soft chime sounded.
“That means the door is unlocked,” Tiffany said, moving past me and pushing open the door. “Some doors open automatically, like the elevator doors that slide sideways. These are push doors, and because there could be someone standing right on the other side, maybe about to leave, you still have to push on them to open them.”
Brian and I followed her through the doors and into the cafeteria, a large room with doors on three sides and a solid wall on the fourth. The persistent white motif continued here, but it was muted, made softer by lighting that wasn’t as bright. Fluorescent banks covered the ceiling as they did everywhere else, but rather than bare bulbs or sparkling-clear, white overlays, these were shielded by covers made translucent by a hazing process, which diffused the light. There were no windows, of course, but the walls featured framed prints of outdoor scenery. Here a tropical rainforest, there a scenic river running through a series of canyons and switchbacks that could be in Wyoming, South Dakota, or Nevada.
A dozen round tables were scattered throughout the room, each with five or six plain wooden chairs placed around them. About a quarter of the chairs were occupied, with most congregating around three or four tables near the center of the room. Familiar faces jumped out at me, James and Gina, Jason and Chris, Angelica and Mrs. Jean, Little Jack and the drivers of the van from the night before, Raymond and Gus, though there were still far more I couldn’t put a name with, like the two guys with red hair, or an athletic dirty-blond woman with an impish cast to her features, like she was either planning a practical joke or had already carried one off and was just waiting for the reaction.
Mrs. Jean and Dave, the telepath, sat side by side at one table with the tall academic from the night before, the teleporter, Jeff.
Only the fox-faced young man sat alone, a strange look of concentration on his face as he leaned over his tray of food. His eyes flicked up for just an instant as we entered before returning to his scrutiny of his breakfast.
Tiffany and Ricardo exchanged “good mornings” with several of the others as they led the way to the only wall without a set of doors. This fourth wall featured an alcove like the one down in the Rec Room, a square three feet on each side. The only difference between this one and the one below was a metal panel on the right side of the alcove, which featured two buttons above a speaker grille.
“Allow me,” Tiffany said, reaching out and pushing a white button labeled Call. A small red light, about the size of a pencil eraser, came to life above the grille,
“Kitchen,” came from the grille, a man’s voice.
“Four breakfast trays to the cafeteria. With coffee.”
“Stand-by,” came the response. The red light turned off.
“It’ll take a couple of minutes,” Ricardo said.
While we waited, I used the time to look around the room again. The one called Bradley was no longer leaning over his food, but had instead begun to eat with gusto, like someone called the start to a hot dog eating competition in a state fair. Maybe he’d been praying before?
A dark-haired man dressed in the ubiquitous black of the soldiers, with short cut hair and broad shoulders, rose from his place at a table next to Little Jack. He turned and started walking toward where we waited.
“That’s Josh,” Tiffany whispered.
“I guess they let him out of the pen,” Ricardo said.
“He’s the one who was like me?” Brian asked, also whispering.
It wasn’t an overly large room, and by the time Brian finished his question, the man named Josh had reached us. His face was drawn and haggard, the face of a man in his mid-twenties who looked and felt a few decades older. His cheeks had the raw look of a recent shave and his hands, when he reached out to offer me a handshake, had the same redness to them, like he’d spent a good bit of time trying to scrub something away.
He cleared his voice twice before speaking. “I’ve been told I have you to thank for saving me,” he said.
I took his hand, returning his firm grip.
“I can remember when they got me,” he said. “The day after the Quins turned on the lights, a group of high school students surrounded me. I didn’t think much of it. There were girls and guys asking questions, like they were interested in learning about the Army. Then one of them pulled out a statue, asking if I’d ever seen anything like it before. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in the Distilling Room, surrounded by a hundred strangers.”
“It’s okay, Josh,” Ricardo said, offering a hand to the soldier.
“I don’t know what they learned from me, and I’m so sorry.”
“Maybe we can compare notes later, try to jog each other’s memory,” Brian offered. When Josh looked at him, he added, “I’m Brian, a Virginia Beach police officer. I was one of the hundred in the pen, one more guy that John saved.”
“If you’re here and not down there, you must be a Chosen,” Josh said. “They haven’t filled me in on everything yet, but I didn’t think Chosen could be converted by a Dra’Gal.”
“Neither did they,” I said, “not until last night.”
The soldier bowed his head, then spoke to Brian, “There’s something in the back of my head, a shadow of a faded memory—”
“—like a voice talking,” Brian said.
“Right. I think I will come talk to you later,” Josh said, offering another handshake to the big cop. “Sorry I intruded. I just wanted to thank you—"
“Call me John,” I said.
“All right. Thank you,
Johnny.” He offered a second handshake to me before turning back to the table with Little Jack, Raymond, and a couple of other soldiers.
“Four trays with coffee coming down,” came from the speaker grille. A green light came on, accompanied by a low whir, the sound of gears and pulleys moving under mechanical power. The doors opened and the smells of hot biscuits, butter, bacon, and fresh coffee flowed out, awakening a hunger deeper than anything I remembered.
“Grab a tray and let’s go sit,” Ricardo said, suiting words to action. The rest of us followed willingly.
Chapter 10
End game possibilities
The Operations Room was like nothing I expected and like a combination of every science fiction fantasy I’d ever read in a book or seen on television all rolled into one. The entire wall opposite the entry door was devoted to computer monitors, stacked side by side and on top of each other in columns and rows, each one depicting a static scene from a different location. A quick count returned a quantity ten high by twenty wide. Just seeing all those screens in one place was enough to warrant my enthusiasm. What they displayed was impossible. Or at least so far beyond my understanding of current monitoring technology as to seem so. They drew me toward them as soon as my feet crossed the threshold. For a few moments, all I could do was stare, ignoring the dizzying array of computer keyboards, the conference table with black leather chairs surrounding it, and the two men already in the room, waiting for us.
Some of the screens showed places within Mandatum, though none resembled a bedroom. It didn’t bother me they would be able to monitor the goings on within their own facility, so long as the surveillance didn’t extend to the personal spaces where people slept. I’m not saying they didn’t have cameras in the barracks room, just that none of them were in evidence at that time.
There were six different views of the outside of a building, with one showing a small hill of grass and stone. As I watched, the hill…split in two, a dividing line that ran left to right across the center. It appeared like a shadowy suggestion, then grew wider, as the top rose and the bottom sank, revealing a concrete ramp running down into an underground garage. A single black van made its way up the driveway and out of the garage, after which the clever door closed again.
After the dream I’d had, it reassured me to know we could see what happened outside.
The other views ran the gamut from interior rooms to grocery stores, the exterior of a Virginia Beach police precinct to boardwalk cameras mounted on the facades of hotels fronting the ocean. Some of the scenes were so familiar I had no trouble figuring out which hotel provided the viewpoint.
What I couldn’t understand was the how behind our ability to see it.
While I could visualize the source of a boardwalk scene from the corner of a 19th street hotel, I had no idea how we were able to look down on Mount Trashmore, or where they set a camera that could provide a panoramic view of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Considering its length, the camera had to be mounted to the bottom of an airplane or a helicopter. The camera didn’t move, though the cars cruising the bridge did, so it had to be a helicopter, or maybe a blimp. How long could they keep it up there? Did the scene ever change?
The bottom twenty monitors caught my attention last, drawing me in and refusing to let me look at anything else. Of all the different views, these were the most pertinent to my situation.
They showed the carnival.
Not as it had been, but as it was now, at eight in the morning on a Friday. There was a timestamp, small digital letters and numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of each monitor, showing the date and time. It was current. Those cameras showed what was happening now.
Did they put them up last night, while they fought the Dra’Gal? Was that the real purpose of their mission, to establish surveillance over the enemy? The scenes looked to be from the perspective of the outer ring of the midway looking in, so the Klystron was clear, as was the Haunted House next to it, but the Steeplechase was only a haze at the edge of the screen.
Four or five of the views were from the other side of the midway, where the girls and I hadn’t ventured, and showed rides and attractions I hadn’t seen before, like a large obstacle course made of inflated mats, barriers, and tunnels. There was a barrel joust, where participants mounted large barrels painted to look like horses. The barrels had ropes running through them from front to back, which the workers could yank and push, making it difficult for the riders to stay on. I wondered if they would also have inflated “lances” to swing at each other.
None of the rides were running at that time of morning. All the brightly colored lights were off, and there didn’t appear to be anyone moving along the midway. No shadows shifted behind the ride counters or within the food trucks, and there were no people busily climbing over and around the attractions, tightening nuts or spot-cleaning areas disturbed by the previous night’s battle.
In fact, the area around the Steeplechase looked spotless, like the whole fight and flight were figments of an overactive imagination. No bodies, no bloodstains…just asphalt and painted surfaces and strings of lights waiting for the afternoon.
There were no monitors showing an image of any part of the trailer park.
“Wow,” Brian breathed. “I’ve seen some pretty high-tech security systems in my day, but never this many camera displays in one place.”
“Some of them are our own,” Iz said, “while others belong to hotels and banks, private residences and hospitals. If it transmits a signal, we can pick it up. The same goes for satellites.”
His words snapped me out of my inspection of the computer monitors. I looked around, noticing first that Tiffany and Ricardo hadn’t come in, followed immediately by the fact that Fish and Iz were already seated, waiting while we ogled like a couple of tourists.
It had only been eight or nine hours since Iz led me down to the Distilling Room. Since then, I’d broken my head, had it fixed, and grabbed a nap. I’d also been able to take a shower and change into clothes that weren’t covered in blood, smoke, and the questionable fluids leaking through the floorboards of a rusty old house trailer. I looked different, felt better, and I certainly smelled better.
The old soldier looked the same. He might have been wearing the same clothes from the night before, or he might have changed into an identical set. He could have slept in them or might have been awake all night, supporting himself with caffeine and adrenaline and fifty years of steely nerve and determination.
Fish was also unchanged, still in the brown shirt and black pants he’d worn the previous night. What shocked me most, and what I should have noted as soon as we entered, was that he still wore his futuristic-looking helmet, all smooth curves and tapered ends, with the tiny blue lights peeking out from inside. What had they said the night before, about the Dra’Gal not being able to breathe the atmosphere of the Quins’ planet? The converted people I’d seen so far hadn’t seemed to have any problem breathing, whether in human form or full-on demon. Did that mean the Quins couldn’t survive in our atmosphere?
“Cool helmet,” Brian said. “I’m Brian King, VBPD.”
The two other men stood to shake the proffered hand.
“Name’s Chris Izzard, but you can call me Iz.”
“Everyone here calls me Fish,” Fish said.
“Is that a nickname for something?” Brian asked.
Knowing what was coming, and wanting the big guy seated for it, I took one of the leather chairs. Iz and Fish resumed their seats, leaving only the police officer standing.
“Please be seated, Officer King,” Iz said. “We’ve got a lot to go over, and not much time to do it.”
Noting the tone of the older man’s voice, Brian asked, “What branch are you?”
“I was a Marine for twenty-five years,” Iz answered.
“Semper Fi,” Brian said softly.
“Roger that. Did you serve?”
Brian nodded. “I did four years with the Navy. Wanted to be a SEAL bu
t ended up washing out of BUDS when I couldn’t shake my fear of heights.”
Iz chuckled, “We have ways of fixing that in the Marines.”
“Don’t think they didn’t try. But nothing worked. Ended up as Shore Patrol for most of my stint, then migrated to the police as a civilian. Been with the VBPD ever since.”
“All right, and what have you heard or figured out so far?”
Brian paused a moment before answering. He cast a look at me, then stared above the other men’s heads at the various monitors. “Johnny told me some of it,” he said, “but he stuck with words and ideas I already know.” He turned his eyes on me for a second, then looked back at Iz. “I don’t think he meant anything bad, but he left out something important. Neither of the other two came right out and said anything to confirm or contradict my own ideas, and I didn’t ask them to. But the way they said certain things, the names they used—”
“Dra’Gal,” Iz said.
“Yes sir, that one. Well, that doesn’t sound like a word I’ve ever heard used before. Now, I’m not a strictly religious guy, and I don’t know the letter of the Bible anywhere near as well as I know the Police Procedure Manual, but that doesn’t sound like the name of any demon I ever heard of. So, I develop an ability that lets me pull anything I want into my hands—”
Fish perked up at this, and Iz raised his eyebrows, but neither interrupted.
“—and the same night, monsters that look like demons but might just as well be aliens start attacking people. Other cops inside my own precinct start changing, and force me to…become one of them, I guess. Five days later, according to Johnny, I wake up in a government installation with a military guy running the show.”
Iz was openly smiling now, and I can admit to a growing admiration for the big police officer. Using the simple combination of what he’d seen and heard, he’d put himself in a frame of mind to accept what might be unacceptable for most of the population, and he’d come to the correct conclusion without the need for any arm twisting or fancy explanations.